I'm running Leopard 10.5.2 with Parallels 3.0.5584, Boot Camp Windows XP partition, typically just running Adobe Framemaker in coherence mode on a 4GB 2.8GHz iMac I've been running it for a short while and unfortunately my impressions so far are not good - it is simply too unstable to use in a production environment. When running it, I will typically experience one of two things on a daily basis: 1) Entire computer hangs (typified by the spinning coloured disk cursor). No application (Mac or PC) is responsive. The resolution is to wait (I would say 2-3 minutes) at which point everything springs back to life, although usually the '[C] My Boot Camp' mount disappears from the Mac side of things. Hard to say whether this is Parallel's fault or not apart from the disappearing Boot Camp mount. 2) Parallels just hangs. 'top' shows it only using 0.5% CPU but it completely unresponsive and requires a 'force quit' to unwedge. This happens so frequently it's bordering on unusable and happens at random (i.e. not when the windows applications are actually doing anything) As a final annoyance, it seems to interact pretty badly with Spaces - dialog boxes etc seem to keep Spaces repeatedly moving to the Parallels workspace even when only showing (for example) a progress bar. Am I alone with these problems? Any advice?
Hello Dhedley, How much RAM is allocated to Parallels and what is your VM RAM? Will you encounter the same issues if you start Parallels right after you have rebooted your Mac, before you run any other application? Best regards, Xenos
Hi Xenos, thanks for your reply. Firstly I neglected to say in my original post that I'm actually very impressed with parallels in general and specifically how well it integrates with the host OS. I was originally running Parallels with all the defaults (512MB RAM allocated). MacOS VM settings are also the default. Parallels is set to open at login. I have since switched to running Parallels in full screen mode and increased its RAM to 1.5GB and it seems to run much better like that - issue 2) above has not occurred since. However, the Mac still freezes several times a day for up to 3 minutes (3 times yesterday). I can still log in remotely via ssh during this time but the window system locks up with a spinning coloured cursor. I am continuing to experiment with various settings in an attempt to narrow down what could be causing it. Do you have any suggestions as to what I can look at while it's in this frozen state? 'top' doesn't show anything unusual. Thanks, David
David, it seems to me that you should increase the RAM allocated to Parallels (not your virtual machine RAM). For this you should go to Parallels Desktop menu bar -> Parallels Desktop -> Preferences -> Memory tab and set the RAM manually. And I would recommend to decrease the VM RAM (in Configuration Editor, Memory section). Here is an article on your issue. Best regards, Xenos
